Tag: science fiction

I broke my posting streak yesterday, so no day 7. I have decided that does not mean starting over or giving up, so here it is day 8 of my attempt to blog every day for 90 days. I won’t be at 100%, but I will keep going and keep counting. The point of the exercise to get myself writing again.

This week will be a bit wobbly and likely short-winded, as I’m trying to finish up a class ASAP that involves building three websites and about 12 hours of remaining lecture. I’d really like to be done with it this week, but we’ll see.

I’ve set up a routine, now that the house is a bit more arranged for it, to watch my class lectures down stairs on the main tv and take notes while lounging on the couch, then head upstairs to build whatever it is on the desktop. Once we have the futon set up for the upstairs landing/living area, I’ll probably do my classes in there, closer to the office.

This is all part of an effort to note where I like to be at certain parts of the day and arrange to the greatest extant possible for the thing I need to do be directly in front of me. I probably should have been medicated for ADHD years ago, but I’m still getting by with my coping mechanisms.

I grabbed a couple of books over the last few days; The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Steve Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control. The former I picked up because I’ve been meaning to do a read through of her works, and the latter was the result of rabbit holing down Google for an idea for a story.

I’m about half way through Sanderson’s Shadows of Self, and it’s picked up the pace. I forget how slow his books tend to start out; they’re usually better to take in as quickly as possible. There is something about Sanderson’s style that feels like his stories are much lighter than they are. There was just a gruesome scene that involved a person murdered by being nailed to a wall through their eye sockets, yet listening to this story still feels like I’m being told a fairy tale. It would be an interesting exercise to dig in and really analyze his style some time. I suspect it’s something in his language choice, a sensation I sometimes get from reading John Scalzi or Chuck Wendig. I also note that all three of these writers are men. Every woman I’ve read lately feels heavy, dark, and visceral. Gods, that would be a weird exercise; why are these gendered authors different?

On the other hand, I think that more classic women speculative fic writers do that have “fairy tale” feel. Anne McCaffrey’s stuff, Vonda McIntyre, any of the weird shit by Andre Norton.

It has just occurred to me that Anne Leckie’s stuff reads like a fairy tale, and she has some truly nighmarish stuff in there.

If I’d made different life choices, this is the sort of thing I’d be publishing papers on right now. I’m not sure what the proper thesis would be, as right now it’s sort a question about what it is about different spec fic authors’ stylistic choices that tickle different parts of my brain in what is likely a wholly subjective and un-measurable way. “Reads like a fairy tale” is terribly vague, and if anyone is bothering to read my stream on consciousness here, I do apologize.

Ah, but I have an example of an author doing both. Kameron Hurley’s The Stars are Legion is really fucking weird, but it also had that old school scifi-fairy tale thing going on. Most of her other stuff I’ve read has been stimulating in other, often horrifying (delightfully so), ways. Maybe it’s the type of story, or the angle of it. I would have to re-read so much stuff to figure out what it is I’m even talking about, and I’d probably just end up using it for a class on book marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, we all have bills to pay, and there probably is something genuinely useful in this vague question I’m trying to ask.

I may shelve this idea until the fall, when I hope to have a little bit of slack for an utterly ridiculous project like a research paper on why different books give me different feels.

Other Worlds Austin is a dedicated science fiction film festival based in Austin, TX. A team of passionate scifi film makers, writers, and fans, they put together a curated collection of independent and classic science fiction movies, with a little horror thrown in. This was my first year to attend, and I am definitely part of the cult now.

I liked almost everything I saw this year, which is not a common experience at most festivals. The curation was films was very well done. They brought in some cool people, like Brian Narelle, who played Lt. Doolittle in Dark Star (1974) and has some of the weirdest stories about film making and fandom. There was a fascinating script writing class by Matt Lohr on Dan O’Bannon’s screen writing style, that dissected the original Alien to examine why it’s such a damn good movie.

Other Worlds is a great little festival, and I can’t wait to see what they put together next year.

I saw nine feature-length movies, and several short films. I’ll be writing proper reviews of my favorites over the next week, so here is a quick recap, in the order that I saw them:

OMG, I’m a Robot! – a quirky Israeli comedy with robots and ridiculous giant guns. Lots of fun, probably hard to find. U.S. premier at the festival.

The Axe Murders of Villisca – creepy, very creepy. The Villisca murders were a real historical event, and the house is supposedly haunted. The film makers explore what happens when bored teenagers break into the house one night.

Dark Star (1974) – The classic film school project by John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon that launched their careers.

We Go On – One of my favorites, this unique ghost story puts plenty of ghost movie tropes in a blender and creates an interesting story that tackles some heavy philosophical questions.

Bed of the Dead – As ridiculous as the title suggests. This weird little horror film came about in an effort to save money and film a movie almost entirely in one room. The constraint pays off, the movie is suspenseful, a good balance of gore to jump scares, with a few mysteries that keep the audience interested.

Stille Reserven – Gorgeous, disturbing German about a dystopian future where our corporate masters have figured out how to stop people from escaping their debts even in death. Also a favorite.

Island of Lost Souls (1932) – One of the best horror films of the 1930’s, but Paramount didn’t spend the money on a musical score, or even basic sound effects. Composer Jay Woelfel decided to fix that, composing, recording and editing an entire soundtrack that fills that gap in the emotional effects of the film. Good stuff.

The Unseen – A cool, weird twist on the idea of the Invisible Man. This is a film worth seeing.

The email announcements have been making big promises of a party tonight that features excessive amounts of chips and queso and chicken tenders. Ah, Round Rock, whirling vortex of Central Texas culture.

Pandemic. You may have heard recently of the Zika virus, a mosquito-born illness that might be causing a birth defect called microcephaly (small heads and brain damage), at high rates in babies born in Brazil. The link between Zika and these high rates of birth defects is not conclusive, but there is definitely something going on in Brazil.

Only in Texas. That said, the Zika virus has now appeared in the US, but not through mosquito transmission. Texas has the honor of having the third known case in the world of sexually transmitted Zika virus, because of course we do.

Cute and Deadly. On a lighter note, oh my gods I need all of these incredible vinyl toys from Shinbone Creative in their Thimblestump Hollow collection.
They’re cute and terrifying, with deep, adorable eyes that could easily draw you down into a sweet, sappy doom of being disemboweled and eaten alive.

Time and Dark Matter. According to Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the nature of Time probably has something to do with dark matter. I read this article three times before I really wrapped my head around the idea he’s getting at. It’s a great think piece, and my head’s spinning with the possible implications for time travel fiction.

Humans are less special. A recent experiment indicates that ravens have a form of empathy, in that they can imagine another creature’s point of view.

I liked Chappie. It’s a very solid contribution to the science fiction subgenre of robot and artificial intelligence movies. It may not appeal to folks who are not well versed in robot movies, and that’s ok.

It makes me sad to see the degree to which formal reviewers have been ripping this movie apart, calling it a tropy ripoff of other robot movies. It’s a robot genre movie, people, come on! Anyone who insists on labeling Chappie as a ripoff of the 80’s classic Short Circuit hasn’t seen Short Circuit in 29 years. As a science fiction loving child of the 80’s who owned a VHS copy of Short Circuit, which got pulled out anytime I was tired of She-Ra and couldn’t whine my parents into renting Gamera again, I can state with great authority that Chappie is no Johnny Five, and it’s a good thing.

Chappie and Johnny Five are both military robots who achieve consciousness, but that really is the one connecting plot device, a similar theme being explored. Johnny Five wakes up sentient somewhat miraculously after basically being hit by lightning, while Chappie’s consciousness was the result of an intentionally installed experimental AI. They both explore the question of what happens after said military robot becomes sentient and starts learning and interacting with people, but they do it in very different worlds, surrounded by very different characters and influences. There are probably four shelves worth of books in the scifi section of my local library that explore this very theme, and they are not considered ripoffs of each other.

There is also the fact that pretty much no one who is more than five years younger than me has ever seen Short Circuit, and it really is ok to recycle old ideas for a modern audience. We have a very different concept of Artificial Intelligence in 2015 than we did in 1986, and I am the sort of person who will probably enjoy any attempt to explore the consequences of AI consciousness in film.

Now that I have defended the hell out of this movie against what I think are empty criticisms, let’s really talk about it.

Chappie is a good science fiction movie. It is not, however, a great piece of scifi, and it will have little or no appeal to people who aren’t really into science fiction. It is possible that it won’t really appeal to anyone who doesn’t love almost any movie with a robot in it.

Neill Blomkamp delivers a disturbingly realistic future where a robotic police force is being tested in Johannesburg. The robots in and of themselves are magnificent works of art. They are covered in minute details from being used in combat, and the way they move is just alien and fluid enough to communicate their status as walking, talking, uncaring weapons. It turns the subtle differences between the normally functioning robots and sentient Chappie into some of the greatest evidence of Chappie’s individuality and character arc.

For reasons I may never understand, Neil Blomkamp and cowriter Terri Tatchell decided to write the stage characters of the South African band Die Antwoord into the film as violent criminals. It’s more than a little distracting to watch Ninja and Yo-Landi play themselves in this movie, and there are scenes that feel like some of their crazier music videos. It does detract from the movie, and I would have enjoyed the story more if the gangster couple had been cast by actors inspired by the band instead of actual rockstars taking up much of the screen time.

Dr. Deon Wilson, played by Dev Patel, is a slightly crazy but well-intentioned scientist with some pretty intense naivety about the world. He has some scenes where he’s trying to imbue Chappie with morals, and I can’t decide whether they were meant to be serious or funny, because they’re right on that line of comical but don’t quite make it there. Other than that, he’s a great character with a different spin on the mad scientist/Dr. Frankenstein trope.

Hugh Jackman is in this movie, has no sideburns, and he’s evil! Really, really evil, and the craziest person in this movie. I found watching him play a different sort of character than I’m used to seeing him cast in to be a delightful treat. Evil Hugh Jackman let me forgive the weirdness of Die Antwood.

To recap:

This is not a movie for everyone. It is a movie for people who love scifi movies about robots and have a tolerance for ridiculousness. Two of the main characters are rock stars playing themselves. This is balanced out by Evil Hugh Jackman. Chappie is, in no uncertain times, in any way a ripoff of Johnny Five from Short Circuit, and the five year old version of me will kick anyone in the shin who keeps trying to argue about that.

Behold the writhing, shuddering horror that is The Squidder, a nightmare made possible by Kickstarter and the darkness of Ben Templesmith‘s brain.

From the horror artist that brought us 30 Days of Night, this graphic story is every post apocalyptic, tentacle-covered horror fantasy you have ever secretly had. It’s Mad Max versus Cthulhu! (Seriously, that’s how Templesmith describes it.)

The story is twisted across the remnants of Earth long after a bloody alien invasion by the Squid that left the broken mess of human survivors as a few scattered lumps of terrified peasantry worshipping their overlords, no memory left of the old world or the war that cost everything. But there are some who remember, soldiers who have lived too long, still burning with the hate for the Squid. These soldiers were the Squidders.

There are cyborgs, there are grotesque tentacled genetic experiments, plagues, intense sword and gun violence, and giant flying squid overlords.

Ben Templesmith’s art is so creepy surreal that it’s a little anxiety inducing. He gets horror. I get chills looking at some of the panels. There’s something organic about this world of shadows and filth that just drills into you.

If you’re into horror comics, you must read this book.

If you enjoy H. P. Lovecraft or anything even remotely tied to Cthulhu, you must read this book.

You must read this book.

IDW is currently publishing it in a 4-issue run that you can pick up at most comic shops. Issue 2 came out last week. It will be available in hardback in September, from 44Flood, and is available for preorder now.

Subscribe to Cheese and Glory!

Never miss another whiskey fueled rant about the injustices done to classically obscure B-movie characters.